


Missing Pieces

by Beleriandings



Category: Critical Role (Web Series)
Genre: Caleb really really loves Frumpkin, Friendship, Gen, Grief/Mourning, approximately canon compliant still, team human cope with death in very different ways, written post episode 29
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-08-17
Updated: 2018-08-17
Packaged: 2019-06-28 14:25:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,945
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/15709044
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Beleriandings/pseuds/Beleriandings
Summary: The Empire Kids are alright. Well, mostly.





	Missing Pieces

**Author's Note:**

> A little fic about Beau and Caleb’s friendship, and them Coping™ with the events of episode 29. Please note, I wrote this while I was away and had not caught up with episode 30 yet, but hopefully it should still be enjoyable/not actually that inconsistent with canon.

“Huh. You really do miss him, don’t you?”

Caleb started at the interruption, causing him to immediately lose his place while counting. His hands twitched sharply enough to send several sticks of incense rolling to the ground, off the edge of his spread-out coat and onto the damp grass, and he raised his head so quickly that he knocked one of his dancing lights that had been hovering right above, sending it bobbing erratically into the tree branches. He looked up in annoyance to see Beauregard crouching on a branch at about head height, leaning against the bole of the tree with folded arms. There was a bushel of firewood strapped to her back and a frown on her face as she watched him.

“Miss who, Beauregard?”

She was silent for a minute, eyes narrowing. “…Frumpkin,” she said. “That incense. It’s to bring your cat back, right? You miss him. …Her? Them?”

He frowned back, picking up the sticks of incense he had dropped. He would probably have to start counting them again from the beginning. Not that he had enough; that much, he was certain of. But counting them made him feel better, at least bringing a touch of order and rationality to the situation. He sighed, setting them down. “I always miss Frumpkin when he is gone, _ja_ ” he said, nodding, keeping his tone as neutral as possible. There was a strange look in Beau’s face, a restlessness in her crouched stance. She was always like that to an extent, but these last few days…well, they had all been different, he supposed. Maybe he just knew her tells better now.

“Right.”

He looked up at her, as silence fell. “I thought you said you were going to build a fire?”

She jumped down from the tree to land beside him, surprisingly soundless as always, with nothing but a little spray of pine needles. She shrugged, dropping the firewood and beginning to arrange it in a little natural depression in the ground, then cast around for some large stones. Caleb stood up to help, walked a little way and brought her the largest stone he could carry – about the size of the coconut Jester had once made them buy at the market in Zadash – by which time, Beauregard had completed the ring around the fire pit and was just finishing stacking the wood and kindling.

She gave Caleb a slightly withering look, and he gave her one right back. She pointed at the fire. “Can you…?”

He nodded, letting a swift stream of flame run down his hand to catch the wood alight. After a few moments, the fire was crackling with bright orange-gold, casting their faces in flickering light and shadow.

Caleb retreated back to his incense, and was just resuming counting, when Beauregard looked up from stirring the fire and spoke.

“I’m guessing you don’t have enough.”

“ _Nein_ , not quite.”

“Well, I guess no Frumpkin for a few more days at least.” There was a tightness in her voice too; something that he couldn’t read, but it sounded like she was driving at something other than what her words said. Or clumsily trying to. He sighed, scooted backwards against the tree, patting the ground beside him.

After hesitating for just a moment, she came to sit at his side, their arms only just touching as they sat together in the quiet of the night. A little way off the others were setting up camp. Caleb felt a sudden sense of unreality wash over him for a moment; without being able to see their travelling companions, and barring the loss of the wagon and several of their horses, this could almost have been a scene from several weeks ago. Perhaps a night’s watch on their journey from Zadash, or from Labenda to Hupperdook. On impulse, Caleb reached into his pocket, touching the stone he had found in the swamp with Nott back then. He almost thought he would be ready to use it for its intended purpose soon; the magic felt simpler now, less out of reach. Or maybe it was him that had changed, he thought.

So little time had passed, and yet so much was different now.

Back then, for one thing, the silence between himself and Beauregard wouldn’t have been such an easy and comfortable one. Caleb was used to uncomfortable silences, of course, heavy and oppressive with unspoken things, but this one felt…better, somehow. Almost like the companionable sort of silence that fell between Caleb and Nott sometimes, where it didn’t feel like a void that either of them needed to bridge with words. For his part, Caleb was as surprised as anyone that he and Beauregard should have ended up with this quality to their silences, and he could only surmise that she was too.

Yet here they were. Caleb frowned, hands twitching instinctively towards Frumpkin’s fur, which – of course – wasn’t there. Beauregard seemed to notice the motion, for she caught his eye again, giving a slight, wry smile. “See, that’s why you should bring your cat back soon. You’re so fucking _twitchy_. It’s irritating as hell.”

“I do not have enough incense to do it on the road” said Caleb. “When we reach a town…” he smiled as she gave an exagerrated roll of her eyes. “Then I will be less twitchy.” He patted her on the shoulder, trying to infuse both sarcasm and affection into the motion. “I promise.”

“You better.”

She folded her hands, then unfolded them, twisting the trailing end of her sash between them. Restless, and apparently unaware of the irony of that given her previous accusation of twitchiness, Caleb thought. The silence between them was growing stiffer now, a little bit of the old discomfort creeping in as they sat together in the quiet wood. That, he predicted with dread, probably meant she was about to ask him something important, or at least something that he would rather not address in the dark of the evening. If ever.

“Hey… Caleb? Can I ask a dumb question?”

He squeezed his eyes shut for a moment. _Right on cue._ It was her tone of voice that clinched it. He raised an eyebrow, scrutinising the pattern on her robe because it was far easier than eye contact. “ _Ja?_ ”

“When Frumpkin dies…while you’re…” she gestured with a hand to her eyes, then waved her hands in the air. That was the sort of thing people who didn’t understand magic did when they wanted to indicate magic, he had learned.

“When I’m looking through his senses?”

“Yes.” She gritted her teeth. “Do…do you feel it? When… I mean…” she rustled around distractedly in one of her belt pouch, drawing out some object and toying with it, apparently without conscious thought. Her words came out too fast, half falling over each other. “Say, the last time, when he was a spider, and got shot with that arrow, and he bit it before you could…” she clicked her fingers. “You know.”

“Ah…I was not quick enough that time.” Caleb frowned, clutching his component pouch tight between his fingers, running his nail across the stitching holding the leather at the edge. Back and forth, a calming repetitive motion. He frowned. “Thus, the incense.”

“Uh huh. But, like….do you feel it?” She gritted her teeth, her hands moving faster, more restlessly. Caleb realised that it was a pack of cards she was fidgeting with, colourful and bright in the dim light. He had never actually handled them himself, but the sight of them was familiar like a bolt through the chest. “So…” Beauregard hesitated, then her final words came all at once. “What does it feel like to die like that?”

Caleb blinked, thinking before answering. “You are nearly as squishy as I am, so, I would have thought you would know, Beauregard. The two of us have both been stabbed, hit on the head, knocked out, whatever else, a hundred times before someone came to heal us.”

“You know that’s not what I mean.”

His shoulders drooped. “… _Ja_. Okay. I do.”

“Well?”

“Well…” he frowned, thinking back to the countless times he had been sharing Frumpkin’s senses, when he had not been quite able to pull his familiar back to safety quickly enough. It was an occupational hazard, but not one he could ever quite get used to; Nott had always understood, always somehow knowing when it had happened, wrapping her skinny arms around him as he surfaced from the in-between place that his consciousness would be whisked to for the barest instant as the pain faded and Frumpkin’s physical form – and the senses Caleb had been inhabiting – functionally died, the spirit of his familiar making its trip back to the feywild and his own consciousness landing back in his own body with more of a jolt than usual. The disorientation, as though it were his own soul that were departing, for just a fraction of an instant. The moment of scrambling, primal panic after, when his senses struggled to reassemble themselves in the living world after the experience.

It was always something he ignored, as best as he could. It wasn’t worse the darker corners of his mind, and there were plenty of those to push it into where he never had to look. It was only a moment, after all, and he could always call Frumpkin back.

Yet, he supposed, it was technically correct to say he knew something of what death felt like.

His hands twisted a little tighter in the worn leather of his component pouch; he felt something snap inside. Probably another stick of incense. Not that it mattered, he could use them for the ritual casting whether they were whole or in fragments. But he forced his hands to be still anyway.

He looked up to see Beauregard waiting for an answer. “It… hurts” he admitted. His eyes went to the cards in her hand; she was holding them spread out in a shape like a fan, her grip tight enough that her knuckles were pale and bloodless as she listened intently. “For just a moment, it hurts.” He frowned. “Then, you are… pulled away.” He was the one to gesture vaguely in the air this time, trying to capture a sensation that words were woefully inadequate for. “It’s like…you’re being pulled in… not a direction really, more like all directions at once… like when you look into the dodecahedron, but more of a closed space, and with finality instead of possibility…” he tailed off; she looked puzzled, and disappointed, and frustrated, and he knew that he had lost her. He sighed. “Can I tell you the truth?”

She gave him a look. “Well, it’s not like that’s what I fucking wanted in the first place…”

He ignored this, running his fingers through his hair, with a hollow laugh. “The truth is, Beauregard, I do not know. I do not _know_ what it’s like to die, to _really_ die. Frumpkin is a cat-”

“Or a spider, or an owl, or whatever, a weird fey thing…”

“Correct. But the point is… Frumpkin is not like us, Beauregard. And I…” he linked his fingers together, wringing his hands nervously. “I think that…I think, even if I could describe the experience, it would not be the same as it would be for us. As it…was for…” he gestured weakly at the cards in her hands, not trusting himself to say more as images flashed through his mind; an advancing figure with firelight glinting off a fearful glaive. A body on the ground, and blood staining the churned up snow as a cart rolled away. A colourful coat hung on a pole, receding in the distance. He gritted his teeth, looking up at her, with spread-out palms. “I do not think that I have much to tell that will help here.” And then, softly, “I am sorry, Beauregard.”

She seemed to understand, though, for she nodded, a little of the tension going out of her. “Okay” she said, surprisingly softly. “I don’t know what I fucking expected you to say. It’s fine, though.”

“…Okay.”

“It’s just…” she dropped the cards to the ground, so that they scattered a little. “You killed that fucker Lorenzo. Which was pretty awesome by the way -”

“Ach. Yes. He…how does one say…had it coming.”

He saw the weary ghost of a smile cross Beauregard’s face. “Yeah, that. But you said, _you shouldn’t have killed my cat_ …”

“…Well, he shouldn’t have.”

“Yeah. But I was wondering…” she broke off, staring at him for a second, then seemed to recede.

“ _Was?_ ”

“You know what…never mind.”

He raised an eyebrow. “You were going to ask me…why I did not mention Mollymauk.”

They both twitched, at the sound of his name. They had not spoken it much, since, and the sound hurt more than Caleb had expected.

Beauregard gritted her teeth, raising her hand as though to run it through the front of her hair distractedly, lowering it again before the motion was fully formed. Her shoulders slumped, just a little, as she looked back up at him. “Maybe I was going to ask, for a moment. I know you got your own shit going on though, and - ”

“I was hardly expecting that spell to even _hit_ him!” he burst out, before she could finish. Against his better judgement, he continued. “Listen, Beauregard. I am not the kind of person who is _supposed_ to  avenge…people like Mollymauk. I am the sort of person who hides in the shadows, with my cat and my magic and maybe sometimes my dear friend who is a goblin. I have no ability, no right, to be the one giving the grand speeches, of dispensing revenge.” He twisted his hands together, frustration flickering within him. “I do, as you say, have my own shit going on. But it was never meant to be me. It should have been your dwarf lady - ”

Beauregard choked a little. ““ _My”-_?”

Caleb ignored her. “Or it could have been you, even…that would have at least been better, Mollymauk cared about you.”

“Fuck’s sake, Caleb. You know he cared about you too right? He…” her voice cracked, and that seemed to make her even angrier. “He fucking cared about _everyone!_ ”

“…Maybe. But the point is…” he felt his throat beginning to close up too. _No, no no no this was not how this was supposed to go_. He was not allowed the luxury of tears, after all he had done. His lip curled, the usual self-disgust rising to the surface. That was better; that was at least familiar. “I…did what I could. I wanted Lorenzo dead. For Mollymauk, yes. For Frumpkin, also yes. For Jester and Fjord and Yasha too, and all the others that must have come before. But I did not think that I would be the one to kill him. I was nearly dead myself, bleeding on the damn floor!” he realised his hands were moving ever more fervently and erratically as he spoke, but didn’t even have the heart to try to still them. “I am not any kind of hero, Beauregard. You should not think of me so. It was luck that I got the last blow on him, and that only. And so, in that moment, I did not think of grand speeches, or avenging our fallen friend.”

“What did you think of?”

He smiled sadly. “My cat. Also the fact that I was very nearly dead myself. But mostly, how much I missed Frumpkin, just then.” He hesitated, shook his head. “Revenge… is not my goal. It is not something that I can or should aim for.” Caleb opened and closed his fist, looking down at it. When he did that, sometimes he imagined he could see fire flicker there, even when there was nothing. “Besides… revenge is only for people who did not deserve the suffering in the first place.”

The words had only just left his mouth; he didn’t see the blow coming until she had already struck him, her closed fist connecting with his cheekbone and the side of his nose sharply and precisely enough that he saw stars. His nose immediately began a steady trickle of blood, dripping down over his lips as he raised his head back up to look at her. She was glaring thunderously at him, fists clenched on both hands.

“ _Ow_?” said Caleb, pinching his nose in annoyance. It didn’t do much to stop the bleeding, the iron tang of it beginning to fill his mouth and the back of his throat. “What was that for?”

“Molly didn’t die as some…” she waved her hands again, seeking the right words, “some _fucking cosmic justice_ for what you did. Yeah, you did some shit. But his death was fucking _senseless_ , and there are so many more evil people in the world than just the ones whose existence you want to unmake, or whatever, doing so much more than the shit you want to undo. So even if you think you’re not a hero…” she gritted her teeth, and Caleb could see tears in her eyes. “If you’re in a situation that makes you one, you better step the _fuck_ up and _be_ a hero. Even if it’s just for a little while.” She looked at him, breathing hard, for a long, long moment. “You owe us all at least that much.”

He looked back, so struck by the haunted look in her eyes that he didn’t know how to respond at first. He thought for a moment that she was about to scramble up to her feet, to run off into the deeper woods, away from the fire, and from the camp that Jester and Caduceus were setting up.

Instead, she did something different. Suddenly, her shoulders drooped as though in defeat, eyes going dark as she dropped her head, passing her hand across her face. She suddenly seemed exhausted, weary and hopeless as Caleb had so often felt.

“ _Ughhhh_ ” she complained, hands grasping at the front of her hair. “Fucking damn it. Look at me. I said I was going to become better, didn’t I?”

“…”

“And here I am, not a week passed since he died, and I’m already, fucking…” she balled her hands into fists. “I’m real _bad_ at this being a good person shit, Caleb. I _punched_ you.”

“You did.” he didn’t really know what else to say. Luckily, as he had suspected, she didn’t need him to say anything; only to listen.

“I mean, to be fair, you were being an insufferable, self-pitying dick…” she held out one hand, then the other, as though weighing a scale. “But… ugh.” She pinched the bridge of her nose, eyes squeezing shut and leaking tears once again. She opened her eyes. “I’m sorry I’m…like this. Just. You and Nott have each other to…I don’t know, talk through your issues and shit? And now Keg is gone…” she made an aimless, despairing sort of gesture with her hands. “The others…they don’t understand. It’s not real for them, not like it is for us. And I just…I know you’re bad at this stuff too - ”

“I really am.”

“-But I…” she tailed off. “Ugh, okay. I shouldn’t have hit you, and I’m sorry about your nose.” Awkwardly - though less awkwardly than the time in the Labenda swamp – she gave him a one-armed side hug.

“That is okay, Beauregard” he found himself saying, frowning as he tried to pat her on the back while not getting too much blood from his nose on her shoulder. He didn’t have much success though, as she pulled him in closer, sobbing and cursing into the shoulder of his coat.

Caleb, for his part, froze in her arms, a little taken aback by this; it was though a flood gate had opened, and now she was shaking with near silent sobs.

Gingerly, he patted her on the back.

After a long while, she stopped crying, leaning back and scrubbing at her eyes once more. “I’m sorry, Caleb” she managed, after a bit more time had passed. “I shouldn’t have said that about your past, _again_.” Once more, she balled her fists in frustration. “I was shitty before, uh, up to and including like five minutes ago. Maybe I still am. But…I’m trying, okay?”

“I know you are” he said, very softly. And then, even softer. “I am trying, too.”

“Yeah. Yeah I know. And I know it looks different from mine.” She smiled a watery smile, drawing back a little. “But you know what? Killing Lorenzo was a pretty fucking good start. I’m willing to let you get away with a lot of shit, for that.”

“I appreciate that.” He hesitated. “You know… I could not have done what I did without you. When you did that, ah, that _pow-pow-pow_ thing…” he flailed vaguely in the air a little, trying to emulate the motions she made in a fight.

It was at least enough to make Beau smile, a little archly. “That’s not… you’re just waving your arms around…” she sighed. “You know what? Thanks, Caleb.”

He nodded, wiping his bleeding nose on the cuff of his coat.

“Oh fuck” said Beauregard, apparently noticing the blood for the first time. “Nott’s going to murder me in my sleep because I busted your sweet little nose. Uh, hang on, let me get you out a healing potion…”

“ _Nein,_ _danke_ ” he said, stilling her hands. “Save them, Beauregard. I am fine.”

She scrutinised his face carefully for a moment, then sat back on her heels with a nod. This revealed that she had knelt on several of his sticks of incense, which were now broken into pieces. “Well, fuck” she said, again.

“It is okay” said Caleb. “They may be broken, but they will still work.”

She said nothing, but gave him that narrow-eyed, calculating look again at this before looking back at his incense. “That…is that still some of the batch Molly gave you, back then?”

He squinted; sure enough, the maker’s insignia pressed into the surface of the incense, the little label around the bundle held on with twine. “Sandlewood and patchouli” he read, shaking his head a little, even as he felt his heart ache to a surprising degree. “That flowery stuff. I am surprised you recognise it.” He watched her eyes fill up with tears once more, watched her scrub angrily at them with the back of her hand.

“You’re going to use it to bring your cat back?”

Caleb nodded.

“Good” said Beauregard, a little too forcefully. “Uh, I mean. It’s what he would have wanted…you know, you’re a worse person when Frumpkin’s not around, right?”

Caleb smiled wryly. “ _Ja_ , I am aware.”

“And I’m…I think when you’re a worse person, I’m a worse person” said Beauregard, dropping her gaze.

“Ja, that too. It is why we have our agreement, is it not?” _Keep each other straight_. Things had been so different when they had made that pact, yet never had they needed it more, he thought.

Beauregard nodded. “Yeah. So uh.” She rolled her eyes, which were still full of tears, avoiding his gaze suddenly. “Bring back your damn cat, okay? Next town, whatever, as soon as we can get the rest of your, uh, magic stuff. But… use the rest of that incense Molly gave you. And we can work on the rest.”

Caleb nodded, and found, to his surprised, that he could not help but smile. “That sounds fair to me.”


End file.
